Online shop Silk Road sells $2m worth of drugs a month

Jacob Aron, technology reporter (Image: Adrianna Williams/The Image Bank/Getty) New analysis of the anonymous online marketplace Silk Road suggests that purveyors of illegal drugs and other black-market goods are raking in the equivalent of nearly $2 million of Bitcoins per month, which is roughly 20 per cent of exchanges from Bitcoins to US dollars that take place on the online currency's main exchange, Mt. Gox . Try flogging narcotics on eBay and you will quickly be shut down, banned and possibly visited by your local law enforcement agencies. Silk Road gets away with its illicit trade because buyers and sellers can connect to the site only through the anonymising Tor network , also used by the likes of Wikileaks and political dissidents, and can make purchases using only Bitcoin. Security researcher Nicolas Christin at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylva...